Shorthand history, these days, says that the 1950s was the decade when Britain paused for a much-needed tea break between the exhaustion of war in the Forties and the start of modern life in the Sixties.

And if it was a tea break, it was one momentously dull one: men, monotone masters of all they surveyed, were served by compliant, inhibited wives who wore curlers, aprons and lipstick and devoted between 60 and 70 hours a week to housework. For women in the Fifties, it was a case of marry or die; and sex was still something the coal came